Re: [PATCH] Add --disable-timezone configure option

[Roland McGrath <roland at hack dot frob dot com>]

> I'm not sure there's much benefit to actually having a package include 
> copies of the data rather than having a --with- argument pointing to where 
> the data files may be found.  By using --with, the package would only need 
> updating pretty infrequently (and people generally want minimal latency 
> when getting tzdata updates).

I hadn't thought of that.  It sounds fine too.

> (It's also not clear all such split-out things need to be entirely 
> separate GNU packages, as opposed to separate tarballs made from separate 
> repositories but under the overall auspices of glibc - much like ports has 
> its own repository and a different, overlapping set of people working on 
> it, but isn't separate at the GNU level.  Though there isn't really any 
> strong glibc connection in the tzdata case.)

I agree that's debatable.  I don't have a strong opinion about it.

> The format hardly ever changes [...]

I know.  But good testing discipline also requires that we presume our
format-reading code has unnoticed bugs (and presume that a new zic may
introduce new format-writing bugs).  So new data files that are supposedly
still in the same format might uncover such a bug, and we want to test for
that.


Thanks,
Roland